


I dreamt / of black current

by bunnypirate (evil_bunny_king), evil_bunny_king



Series: Salt Water [3]
Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: F/M, Post-Game, byleth pov, letter writing, post-epilogue, post-epilogue date? yep definitely a date, reunions and refinding each other, softest thing I've written in an age and I am not over it, wyvern watching, wyvern wrangling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-26
Updated: 2020-04-26
Packaged: 2021-03-02 00:07:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,876
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23855842
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/evil_bunny_king/pseuds/bunnypirate, https://archiveofourown.org/users/evil_bunny_king/pseuds/evil_bunny_king
Summary: “Let’s escape,” Claude says, taking her hand in his.  He's bruise-smudged, smiling, as he slots his fingers between hers. “I want to show you something.”
Relationships: My Unit | Byleth/Claude von Riegan
Series: Salt Water [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1747756
Comments: 19
Kudos: 138
Collections: The Golden Gifts - Claudeleth Fic/Art Exchange





	I dreamt / of black current

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AcquaSole](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AcquaSole/gifts).



> Written for the most wonderful PaniPuriPop/acquasole/soojitoast. One of your prompts was 'learning to fly on a Wyvern' and - well, you'll see. :)
> 
> (I am forever indebted to my beta reader ejunkiet for helping get this over the finish line)
> 
> For this one, I give you two songs:
> 
> Black Current - Rachel Sermanni (hello, title)  
> Colour Song - Maggie Rogers

There’s still blood on Byleth's boots and smoke in her hair when Claude finds her in the garden of the Derdriu ducal palace, in the aftermath of the siege.

“Let’s escape,” he says, bruise-smudged and smiling. He takes her hand, slotting his fingers between hers and tugging her easily to her feet. The light is failing around them, torches displacing the gloom. “I want to show you something.”

His grip is warm as he leads her through the press of the regrouping soldiers, dodging through the throng until they emerge into the city proper. In the middle like this, they’re anonymous, disguised by the soot and the sweat and relief of victory- impossible and hardwon as it is. After everything they’ve been through, it feels like a dream. For the months that have passed since she’s seen Claude last, it _could_ be a dream.

 _-Khalid, he’d said, pressing a kiss to her temple, her jaw_ (and he smells the same - he tastes the same)

_“Khalid,” she’d tried his name in her mouth, the day he’d given her his ring, and she’d sworn he’d shivered, his arms tightening around her, his breath hot against her neck._

_“Don’t forget me,” he’d said, with a huff like a laugh, but he hadn’t let go, and neither had she._

_They’d stayed on the terrace of the monastery until the cold had frozen their hands and she’d chased him inside with the touch of her icy fingers._

Finally away from the smoke and a year apart, a breeze blows from the ocean, bringing the smell of salt and sea with it.

“Khalid,” she tries again. It’s been a long time since she’s had a chance to say it.

His hand in hers tightens, and it's all the warning she gets before he tugs her into the shadow of a building and kisses her - slow and warm and hungry, lips chapped from the fight and firm, and then gentle.

When they break for breath, he brushes the tip of his nose against hers.

"Don't do that," he breathes. He taps his thumb against their joined hands, and his eyes are dark and smiling. "Or we'll never get there."

“Claude, then,” she says, her voice more rasped than she expects and he laughs and dips in for another kiss.

Eventually he tugs on their joined hands and she lets him lead her across the final few bridges until they reach where the harbour wraps around the city like a sickle moon. Across the water, the lights of the Almyran ships glow against the fog, strains of music and laughter catching on the breeze. The fog gathers, rolling slowly towards the city - but before it, slicing through the waves-

“Do you see them?” Claude murmurs in her ear and he leans in close, raising their hands to trace the movement as a shadow dives between the ships.

A moment later Wyvern bursts from the harbour in a shower of water like sparks, something flashing silver in its locked jaws - and it’s a fish, she realises; they’re fishing.

“They wouldn’t fit in the city,” is all Claude says, and she can hear the smile. 

As they watch, another breaches the waves, water shivering from its wings on the downbeat. It skims towards the flat, open belly of a ship and perches there on the stern, crouching over its prize. She can see the amber glitter of its scales in the torchlight, the familiar movement of the figures around it. It’s a strange kind of wild beauty - and different from what experience she has of them from the Monastery or the Derdriu aviaries, managed by handlers and stable hands.

She thinks about Claude’s words.

“Could we have found room?” she asks after a moment, her grip tightening in his.

Before an army had resurrected in the former Empire and razed a trail through their fledgling country, they had planned ways to bring their countries together. They’d sent envoys, exchanged battalions; harried their diplomats into moving towards formal rapprochement; and even in the haste of their final preparations they’d sent letters - but now that they have victory, won together, there are still distances, hatreds, that she doesn't know how to bridge.

He glances at her, and then squeezes her hand back, his smile different, softer. “Maybe,” he says, and he reaches out to draw her back against his chest, his arms sliding around her waist. He wraps his cloak around the both of them. She feels as much as she hears his thoughtful hum. “But we didn’t need to. Besides, the ships are almost empty, now. Most of them are already ashore, celebrating the victory.”

She remembers the blur of faces, clothes and voices as they’d passed through the city- the smell of cooking from a hundred family kitchens, the tables brought out to line the canals and the palazzos. Music and drinks and betting games in different languages, finding common ground.

“It’s just a start,” he says, as if following her train of thought, “but it is one." His arms tighten around her. She’s warming despite the chilled evening, secure in the strength of his arms. “I’m glad we got here in time.”

And despite their preparations, their plans, it had been close. It had reached the point of siege too quickly and her army had been pushed to a final stand in the mainland fortifications off Derdriu, flank to the sea, the calls of the Almyran horns and the Wyvern finally heralding the turning tide.

He presses a kiss against the top of her head, murmuring more words that she can’t catch into her hair and she twists in his arms until she can face him - because she is sick of thinking of battles and could’ve beens. She brushes her fingers along his jaw, his wilder beard, because she can.

He blinks at her, slowly, windburnt and dark-eyed.

“This is what you wanted to show me?” she asks, when she remembers to.

He touches their noses, and then, as if being pulled in, he kisses her again - chapped, soft lips, the rasp of his beard. Something that feels like her heart flutters- it keeps fluttering, and she thinks she’ll get dizzy if he keeps this up. “Yes,” he says, eventually. “And I wanted to spend time with you.”

She smiles, broadly and a little helplessly.

“I thought you might want to go flying.”

He laughs in the small space between them and lets his forehead rest against hers.

“In the dark?”

“I didn’t say it was a _good_ idea.”

He grins. “I can take you tomorrow, if you like. At first light, before the courtiers can sink their hooks in.”

“I would like that,” she says, and he releases her enough to tap her chin.

“I will hold you to that,” he says, and she doesn't doubt it.

"Did you know,” he says after a moment, and she glances up. She’s now tucked against his side, still under his cloak - she doesn’t need it, not really; she doesn’t mind the cold, but she likes the proximity all the same. “That in the years after the Monastery fell, wild wyverns roosted in the ruins?”

She blinks. She did not. “They did?”

“They did," he confirms, idly drawing a pattern along her arm. He looks out to sea. "I stumbled over them, a year or so before you returned. I thought of all places they’d take the tower, but there they were in the Cathedral, staking out the corner where the advice box used to be and hissing at hapless adventurers.” She imagines Claude, somewhere between the boy she’d known and the man he’d become, scarpering back out of the Cathedral with a Wyvern snapping at his heels. It’s patently ridiculous and also somehow makes her feel a little sad. The feeling is chased away when he laughs. “They’d made a nest of sorts, from a few of the pews and burnt out timbers. I even fancied I saw Seteth’s desk in there."

She laughs, surprising herself.

"I wonder," she says. "I seem to remember him hunting for that desk."

He hums. “Another unresolved mystery.”

They remain like that for a while, in the gathering dark. There are wingbeats, the waves; muffled music across the water. Drunken revelers and couples wander along the canals, following them to the sea, and Claude, Khalid, is here. He is here.

She watches the Wyvern skimming the harbor, chasing the dusk. When she thinks he's not looking she watches the fading light across his profile.

“Do you remember the letters you’d send me?” she says, and then blinks, realising she’d spoken out loud. She feels him nod, and so she continues, thankful he can’t see her rising blush in the dark. Her pulse, or maybe her heart, is fluttering again. “I used to reread them in the window box, the one in your grandfather’s old study. I kept spilling candle wax on the polished wood. The housekeeper was plotting mutiny.”

Claude laughs again. “Really? Oh, what I would’ve paid, once, to see that.”

She’d felt like a child in that tall room, boosted by the pillows she’d brought with her and her pile of forgotten books. When she extinguished the candles, she’d been able to see the stars.

[ _-and I think about you, in that thin coat that you love with the too-long sleeves, that you should've replaced by now but still haven't (please find suggestions, attached). I think about you, looking at the same sky._ ]

She looks up now and finds the moon, haloed in the approaching fog. When she looks back at him he’s watching her, instead. He reaches out, gently brushing her hair from her cheek and tucking it behind her ear and the gentleness makes her skin tingle, her chest warm, full.

“I missed you too, you know,” he says, eyes gleaming. And she laughs, a little breathless. Of course he reads her even now.

“I missed you more,” she says aloud anyway, and the way he grins is delighted and silly and she loves it with a force that could consume her and she’d let it.

“I have more of those, by the way. Letters.” He presses another gentle kiss to her forehead. “I’ve been writing to you for a while, even when I had nowhere to send them to. I’d like to share them with you, sometime.”

She doesn’t think she’s imagining the flush rising on his neck but he meets her gaze straight on all the same.

“I will hold you to that," she echoes.

He laughs and kisses her for that, smiling against her mouth, and the last wyvern beats heavily out of the water, slow and gorged, retreating back over the waves to the moored ships.

They stay a little longer, looking at the stars.

\--

True to his word, Claude meets her the next morning, and then the next, and the next, awaiting her at the entrance to the ducal palace gardens. Catching sight of her, he bows, with the extravagant flare that reminds her of his Monastery days, chased by a curving grin, and as they walk back to the harbour he snags her hand and presses a lazy kiss against it.

After each ride he rewards her with another letter.

**Author's Note:**

> .......the characters totally ran away with this one, I'm sorry BUT I hope you enjoyed it all the same. Softness. So soft.


End file.
